Conflict in Living Systems

By Linda Booth Sweeney

It’s hard to see patterns of connection that make up systems. For the most part, we have to imagine how this influences that.

I was reminded of this during the snowstorm we had here outside of Boston this week. With school closed, my two boys had perhaps too much together time. What started out as a sharp word or two, ending up in not-so-playful snowball fight. Eventually, I took each one aside to find out what was going on. They both told a similar story: A cutting comment from one, led the other to comment back, which led to a poke, then a tackle (you know the scenario). In both of my sons’ explanation, I heard a common pattern - often seen in systems - called escalation. (If you don’t have children, just think about any situation that escalates like the old advertising campaigns for Coke and Pepsi, competing street gangs, or the current situation between Palestine and Israel. So, brothers, companies, countries can all be viewed as “living systems”; the difference is the scale.)

Whether you’ve studied systems or not, you know the pattern I saw. One party does something that is seen as a threat by another party so the other party responds in kind, increasing the threat to the first party. This results in even more threatening actions by the first party and the cycle continues. Seeing this pattern I drew the following picture with my boys:

(Here’s how you read it: Start in the middle. One boy, let’s call him “J”, makes a move to be more awesome than the other. Now, moving to the bottom of the right-hand loop, we see this annoys “T”, who then throws a poke of some sort at his brother. “T” then feels and then probably expresses some level of satisfaction. Then the cycle continues on the left-hand side, with “J” now feeling annoyed at “T” and so on.)

When I asked: “Would you say this is what’s going on?” they both agreed immediately but then quickly started talking over each other. They were all excited.

“Look,” one of them said, pointing to the diagram, “it’s a figure eight lying on its side.” The symbol of infinity.

“This thing could go on forever."

“And just keep getting worse,” the other groaned.

As we talked about it, the growing conflict was driven by each one trying to “out-cool” or “top-dog” the other. The more “cool” behavior one kid put on, the more the other wanted to squash it. As it turns out, one was particularly good at “poking” and the other one was good at “squashing”.

For that one snowy afternoon (with their Mom at her wit’s end), they saw themselves as part of the “system”, rather than separate from it. They “got” that focusing on just one of them wasn’t going to solve the problem. When they could see how their actions were actually fueling the actions of the other (with the help of a simple picture) they then were able to talk about how they might break the cycle. When I asked what they could do differently, the answer came easily. The poker would lighten up on the poking, and the squasher wouldn’t squash so much.

When our children learn to see systems, they see that nothing stands alone, which means that my bully is your bully, my climate is your climate, your disaster is my disaster, your food shortage is my food shortage. They learn to stop jumping to blame a single cause for the challenges they encounter and instead, look for multiple causes, effects and unintended impacts. They learn to move beyond bullet points to see more web-like patterns of cause and effect that more closely match the more interdependent, complex world live in. They remember that their world is interconnected and changing, a tightly woven web people, places, event and nature, and as such, is indeed meaningful.
~~~~~~
To read more about living systems and Linda Booth Sweeney's book, Connected Wisdom, read our previous blog posts here and here.